


Waters of Strife

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood), PhryneFicathon



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Domestic Violence, F/M, Murder, Murder of a pregnant woman, Phryne Ficathon, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-02-26 07:30:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13230933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhryneFicathon/pseuds/PhryneFicathon
Summary: Jack tries to prevent Phryne from going outside the law.





	Waters of Strife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TeaandBanjo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeaandBanjo/gifts).



> Written for the 3rd Annual Phryne Ficathon. Prompt: [“Little Omie” by Doc Watson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCPaldp9qDE).

Phryne Fisher stood under the single yellow electric light, looking at the body under the sheet as though she half-expected the deceased to rise from the mortuary table and pronounce judgment on her.

Perhaps, Jack thought, standing to one side with his hat in his hands, she did.

“This is my fault,” she said softly.

“You did everything you could. You talked her down from the bridge once as it was.”

“I could have gotten her away. I could have found her treatment. I could have – I __should__ have been more persuasive.”

“You couldn’t watch her for the rest of her life.”

She let out a sound of dismay. “What life? She was nineteen, Jack.”

“I know.” He watched her stroke the girl’s forehead, smooth and still, through the sheet, and wondered if she was remembering herself at that age. The situations were strikingly similar: young, poor, alone in a strange country, involved with an abusive, possessive man who had used her for his own pleasures – and in Gladys Pietrzak’s case, gotten her pregnant and then all but abandoned her.

Phryne shook her head. “I should have—”

Jack interrupted her. “What could you have done, other than what you did? She listened to you, thanked you, blessed you, even—”

“—and then a week later, she ended up in the river anyway.” Phryne swallowed. “As though I never even existed.”

“The world doesn’t revolve around you, Miss Fisher,” said Jack, very gently.

She huffed out a laugh with no humor to speak of. “When I came home in ‘twenty-eight, Mac warned me that I couldn’t save them all. At least she won’t lord this over me.” Phryne moved to the counter, slowly, as though all her muscles ached, and lifted a small crucifix on a chain from Gladys’s personal effects. “She was a Catholic, Jack. The church won’t allow a suicide to be buried in one of their cemeteries, let alone one who killed her unborn child as well as herself. …Though I’m fairly certain that Father O’Leary is the sort of man who’d sooner overlook a murder than a suicide.”

“True.” Jack had no personal feelings about death at one’s own hand; after four years of war and twenty years on the force, most of them in homicide, he understood how it could feel like the only way out. But most people, he knew, saw it as a personal failing of the highest order. “Have you read the coroner’s report yet?”

Phryne shook her head. “No,” she said, after a long moment in which she lowered the crucifix, on his chain, back into the bundle of Gladys’s water-stained clothing. “I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at it.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Come outside with me.”

They left without turning the sheet back to look at Gladys’s face, and went out. The nights in winter came early, and the lights from the various other offices in the building shone yellow in the blue-blackness that threatened to swallow them. Phryne leaned on the walkway’s railing and took a deep gulp of the cold, bracing air of the upper gallery. “Well? What’s the official cause of death?”

“Drowning, without a doubt.” Phryne let out a sigh. It was a defeated sound. “But,” Jack continued, “there __is__ some doubt as to whether she could have saved herself.” He braced himself to meet Phryne's eyes calmly. “She was beaten severely before she went into the water. She might’ve even been pushed, but that’s only a theory.”

Something very dark passed over Phryne Fisher's face, and in spite of himself, Jack Robinson shivered. “She was afraid of him, Jack. She said he would kill her, when he found out about the baby.”

“Yes, Jim Alton, the boyfriend. I’ve already sent men out to bring him in to identify the body. We’ll hold him for questioning as well.”

“I want to be there.”

“Absolutely not.”

She stood up to her full height, which with her heels on meant she could look him dead in the eye. “Don’t you dare. Don’t try to keep me out of this.”

“You’re too involved.”

“You’re damned right I am. That girl asked me for help but I didn’t understand, and now she’s dead. I am involved up to my eyebrows and you’re not going to—”

“Yes,” said Jack. “I am. I can and I will, because I have to. Because I __know__ what will happen if I don’t.” He loved Phryne Fisher, God help him, but he was under no illusions about her. Give her an opportunity and she’d shoot every man in Melbourne, if it meant protecting one woman from another beating. “If you want justice for this girl, you have to let me do my job. And that means not going on the warpath behind my back.”

“I don’t do anything behind your back, Detective-Inspector.”

“No, you’d do this right in front of my face.” His jaw tightened at the memory of the many, __many__ times she had done just that. “I won’t let you try and get a man executed on no evidence. And right now, we have no evidence.”

“I saw her face when she said his name. That’s all the evidence I need.”

“Driving someone to suicide isn’t the same as murdering them.”

“It’s as good as.”

“Not under the __law__ , Miss Fisher.”

“And what is the law going to do, Jack?” she demanded. “Will you be able to prove that he threw Gladys into the water? That he beat her so badly she wasn’t able to save herself from the river?”

“The law will do what it can.” Which would not be enough. Alton would walk free, in the end. “You know I will do everything I can. You __know__ that.”

“And when everything you can do isn't enough?” Phryne asked softly. “What then? Am I to just forget her face?”

“No. We can’t ever forget their faces. Our failures.” He swallowed hard, wishing for whiskey and privacy. Out here in the open, in official spaces, he could not say what he wanted to. Especially not when what he wanted to say, that sometimes the law was not enough, turned his stomach. He had always known it. But his hands were tied, and it was better that way. “Let me do my job, Miss Fisher. And you do yours.”

“And what is ‘my job’?” Her smile was very bitter, like dried blood. “To just carry on until the next battered woman turns up on a slab?”

“No. To not tell me what happens after you leave here tonight,” said Jack Robinson gruffly, setting his hat on his head. “Can you do that, Miss Fisher?”

“...Yes, Detective-Inspector Robinson. I believe I can.”


End file.
